Here Mr. Allen is at his best, representing young love springing up
fiercely, exuberantly, against a lovely background congenial to the
human mood. He has not known, however, how to keep up that difficult
equilibrium between artifice and simplicity which the idyl demands. His
later books tend to be turgid, oppressive, cloying with sentimentalism
and amorous obsessions in their graver moments, and in their lighter
moments to fall flat from a lack of the true sinews of comedy.

Of a temper as different as possible from Mr. Allen's was Edgar Saltus,
just dead, who stood alone and decadent in a country which the _fin de
siècle_ scarcely touched with its graceful, graceless maladies. He began
his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with _The Philosophy of
Disenchantment_ and _The Anatomy of Negation_, erudite, witty challenges
to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but
enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current
French philosophers and poets. Erudition, however, was not Saltus's sole
equipment: his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in
part also from a temperament which steadily followed its own impulses
and arrived at its own destinations. Cynical, deracinated, he turned
from his speculative doubts to the positive realities of sense,
becoming the historian of love and loveliness in sumptuous, perverse
phases. In _Mary Magdalen_ he dressed up a traditional courtesan in the
splendors of purple and gold and perfumed her with many quaint,
dangerous essences more exciting than her later career as penitent; in
_Imperial Purple_ he undertook a chronicle of the Roman emperors from
Julius Caesar to Heliogabolus, exhibiting them in the most splendid of
all their extravagances and sins; in _Historia Amoris_ he followed the
maddening trail of love and in _The Lords of the Ghostland_ the
saddening trail of faith through the annals of mankind.